Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Blade Runner 2: Written By Someone Who Probably Needs A Slap

We’ve never met Travis Wright, but we imagine that he hates you - otherwise he wouldn’t be deliberately provoking you like this.

You see, Travis Wright is one of the writers of Eagle Eye - the movie that’s top of the American box office despite looking like it was crapped out by a puppy with a gammy tummy - and for his next trick he says he’s working on a script for Blade Runner 2.

Obviously Travis Wright writing a Blade Runner 2 script is a terrible idea. Not because of the important cultural significance of the original or anything, though. No, we’re dead against the idea of Blade Runner 2 for one reason and one reason only - it’ll probably end up having bloody Shia LaBeouf in it, won’t it.

If you were to make a list of films that nobody should ever think about giving a sequel to, Blade Runner would be right at the top, along with The Godfather and James Bond. Blade Runner was an especially singular film; both direct enough to work as an action movie and vague enough for its audience to interpret it however it wanted. The last thing it needs is a sequel.

But tell that to Travis Wright, one of the co-writers of Eagle Eye. According to an email received by Slashfilm, he’s working on a sequel to Blade Runner himself right now:

“I recently attended a Q&A session with one of the writers of ‘Eagle Eye’ after a free screening organized by the magazine CreativeScreenwriting. During the Q&A, the writer said that he and whomever it was that helped him co-write the ‘Eagle Eye’ screenplay were in the process of writing a sequel to Blade Runner, and had already contacted the producers of the original, etc.”

Best of all, according to the email, the full title of Wright’s script is Blade Runner 2: Meet The Deckards! and proposes that Eddie Murphy will star as all of Harrison Ford’s extended family.

That’s a lie. Actually the Blade Runner 2 script is still going to be set in 2019, but with Phillip K Dick’s technologically dystopian worldview reduced into something a bit more realistic-seeming to audiences of 2008. To mirror this, during the movie’s climax, when Harrison Ford kills another replicant who looks a bit like Rutger Hauer, the replicant gives this stirring soliloquy:

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. A cat in a shoe on the internet. A drunk man trying to bum a Landrover at lunchtime. A Nintendo Wii. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain…”

That’s a lie as well. In fact, by all accounts it seems as if Blade Runner 2 hasn’t got any sort of studio backing whatsoever, and that Travis Wright is just writing it in the dim hope that someone one day will want to pay for it.

That’s fairly unlikely to happen - not many people are stupid enough to want to sully a classic like Blade Runner with an rashly thought-out sequel - and so the fate of Blade Runner 2 is set.

It’ll be filmed in the woods on someone’s mobile phone and star a couple of blokes from accounts and the HR lady’s sister, the way all good sci-fi sequels should be.